Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/341/en

In the nineteenth century, the natural sciences and technology gradually took over the direction of an agriculture estranged from its spiritual impulses. From the very outset, one agricultural faculty after another was founded. In the foreground stood the question of what had been called the "old strength of the soil," and from this the question of manuring. People wanted to understand what had given the soils their enduring fertility across the ages. They had lost sight of the wholeness of the organism of agriculture and the interworking of its members, and sought instead for individual factors. They recognized the significance of humus as the bearer of fertility. In order to pursue this question of sustained soil fertility experimentally, the Rothamsted long-term manuring trial was laid out in Kent, England, in 1853. In a plot with farmyard manure dressing, this dressing was discontinued after a time, and after fifty years the after-effects of that former manuring were still to be observed. This, together with later long-term trials carried out elsewhere, confirmed that the "old strength" was essentially to be credited to the keeping of cattle within the organism of agriculture.